1,916 entries categorized "Intelligence"

March 30, 2015

The New York Times reports one man was killed and a second was injured on Monday when their car tried to crash through a gate at the National Security Agency in suburban Maryland, and security personnel opened fire, said a spokesman at Fort Meade United States Army Base. A law enforcement official said both men were dressed as women, and identified the survivor as Kevin Fleming of nearby Baltimore. They were driving a Ford Escape S.U.V. that had been reported stolen. “The incident has been contained and is under investigation,” said Col. Brian Foley, Fort Meade garrison commander. “The residents, service members and civilian employees on the installation are safe. We continue to remain vigilant at all of our access control points.” An F.B.I, spokeswoman, Amy Thoreson, confirmed that “a shooting incident” had taken place at an N.S.A. gate just off Interstate 295, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. “We do not believe it is related to terrorism,” she said.

March 26, 2015

Reuters reports the United Nations top human rights body agreed on Thursday to appoint a special investigator to probe digital spying and violations of online privacy. Brazil and Germany spearheaded the resolution, which voiced deep concern over electronic surveillance and the interception of digital communications, as well as data collection by governments and private companies. Former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden exposed mass surveillance of private emails and phone data across the world two years ago, sparking outrage. "States must respect international human rights obligations regarding the right to privacy when they intercept digital communication of individuals and/or collect personal data," Brazil's ambassador Regina Dunlop told the U.N. Human Rights Council in presenting the resolution.

Brazil's government fell out with Washington at the time over revelations that the NSA had eavesdropped on President Dilma Rousseff. Snowden has said the United States also carried out large-scale electronic espionage in German"States must respect international human rights obligations regarding the right to privacy when they intercept digital communication of individuals and/or collect personal data," Brazil's ambassador Regina Dunlop told the U.N. Human Rights Council in presenting the resolution.

March 25, 2015

The Washington Post reports crashing drones are spilling secrets about U.S. military operations. A surveillance mission was exposed last week when a Predator drone crashed in northwest Syria while spying on the home turf of President Bashar al-Assad. U.S. officials believe the drone was shot down, but they haven’t ruled out mechanical failure. Regardless, the wreckage offered the first hard evidence of a U.S. confrontation with Assad’s forces. The mishap in Syria follows a string of crashes in Yemen, another country where the U.S. military keeps virtually all details of its drone operations classified. Yemeni tribesmen have reported three cases in the past 15 months in which U.S. drones have fallen from the sky, pulling back the curtain on likely surveillance targets. Air Force spokesmen said they could not confirm any crashes in Yemen, but Air Force records obtained by The Washington Post show the dates match up with official acknowledgments of accidents that occurred in classified locations

March 24, 2015

BBC News reports Israel has strongly denied a report that it spied on US-led talks on Iran's nuclear program in order to build a case against a deal. A senior Israeli official told the BBC that the claims, reported in the Wall Street Journal, were "utterly false". The Journal said the White House had been particularly angered that Israel allegedly sought to share confidential details with US lawmakers and others. Many Republicans in Congress are opposed to a deal with Iran. Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress that a deal being discussed could "pave Iran's path to the bomb". The U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China are seeking an agreement to curtail Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. They fear Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb - something Iran denies. Israel is not a party to the negotiations although it feels particularly threatened by the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran.

March 17, 2015

The Guardian reports the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will file a disclosure lawsuit for secret Obama administration documents specifying, among other things, the criteria for placement on the so-called “kill list” for drone strikes and other deadly force. Information sought by the ACLU includes long-secret analyses establishing the legal basis for what the administration terms its “targeted killing program” and the process by which the administration determines that civilians are unlikely to be killed before launching a strike, as well as verification mechanisms afterward to establish if the strike in fact has caused civilian deaths.

Reuters reports a Pakistani lawyer under death threats for defending a doctor who helped CIA agents hunt al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was shot dead on Tuesday, police said, and two militant groups claimed responsibility. Samiullah Afridi represented Dr Shakil Afridi, who was jailed in 2012 for 33 years for running a fake vaccination campaign believed to have helped the U.S. intelligence agency track down bin Laden. That sentence was overturned in 2013 and the doctor is now in jail awaiting a new trial. Samiullah Afridi was shot dead on Tuesday as he was returning to his home in the northwestern city of Peshawar, police said. According to media, he had recently returned there from abroad after leaving Pakistan for his safety.

March 16, 2015

CNN reports Mike McConnell, who served as director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush, made the comments during a speech at the University of Missouri on Thursday. "The Chinese have penetrated every major corporation of any consequence in the United States and taken information," he said. "We've never, ever not found Chinese malware." He said the malware lets Chinese spies extract information whenever they want. McConnell, who also led the NSA from 1992 until 1996, continues to investigate hacks as a high-ranking adviser to Booz Allen Hamilton. The U.S. government has said it has caught Chinese spies stealing blueprints and business plans. Last year, federal prosecutors took the unprecedented step of filing formal criminal charges against five Chinese government spies for breaking into Alcoa, U.S. Steel Corp., Westinghouse and others.

March 11, 2015

Reuters reports the U.S. National Security Agency was sued on Tuesday by Wikimedia and other groups challenging one of its mass surveillance programs that they said violates Americans' privacy and makes individuals worldwide less likely to share sensitive information. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Maryland, where the spy agency is based, said the NSA is violating U.S. constitutional protections and the law by tapping into high-capacity cables, switches and routers that move Internet traffic through the United States. The case is a new potential legal front for privacy advocates who have challenged U.S. spying programs several times since 2013, when documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the long reach of government surveillance.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement, according to people familiar with the work. The CIA and the U.S. Marshals Service, an agency of the Justice Department, developed technology to locate specific cellphones in the U.S. through an airborne device that mimics a cellphone tower, these people said. Today, the Justice Department program, whose existence was reported by The Wall Street Journal last year, is used to hunt criminal suspects. The same technology is used to track terror suspects and intelligence targets overseas, the people said.

March 04, 2015

BBC News reports the FBI says one man is in custody for firing shots that damaged a National Security Agency (NSA) building. The spy agency reported damage to its building in Fort Meade, Maryland on Tuesday. The man is believed to be responsible for shooting a truck in a separate incident about 12 miles (19 km) away. Police are investigating whether he is linked to similar incidents over the past few weeks. Authorities have not released the identity of the man who was taken into custody on Tuesday night. Around 2:40 PM on Tuesday, a truck was struck by gunfire which resulted in one person being transported to hospital for injuries sustained from broken glass. Later in the day, gunfire was reported along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, a major connection between Washington, DC and Baltimore. The NSA reported damage to its building, but said no one was injured.

March 03, 2015

BBC News reports David Petraeus, a former CIA director and four-star general, has reached a plea deal with the US Justice Department in which he will admit to mishandling classified materials. It ends a long investigation into whether he provided secret information to his mistress. He resigned from his post at the CIA in 2012, after it emerged he was having an affair with his biographer. A Justice Department statement said a plea agreement had been filed. The deal means thatPetraeus will plead guilty to one count of unauthorised removal and retention of classified material, but could avoid an embarrassing trial. The charge carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison, the New York Times reported.

February 23, 2015

The Washington Post reports CIA Director John O. Brennan is planning a major expansion of the agency’s cyber espionage capabilities as part of a broad restructuring of an intelligence service long defined by its human spy work, current and former U.S. officials said. The proposed shift reflects a determination that the CIA’s approach to conventional espionage is increasingly outmoded amid the exploding use of smartphones, social media and other technologies. U.S. officials said Brennan’s plans call for increased use of cyber capabilities in almost every category of operations — whether identifying foreign officials to recruit as CIA informants, confirming the identities of targets of drone strikes or penetrating Internet-savvy adversaries such as the Islamic State.

The New York Times reports a newly disclosed National Security Agency document illustrates the striking acceleration of the use of cyberweapons by the United States and Iran against each other, both for spying and sabotage, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart met in Geneva to try to break a stalemate in the talks over Iran’s disputed nuclear program. The document, which was written in April 2013 for Gen. Keith B. Alexander, then the director of the National Security Agency, described how Iranian officials had discovered new evidence the year before that the United States was preparing computer surveillance or cyberattacks on their networks.

February 20, 2015

BBC News reports an MI5 agent has given evidence in a shoulder-length wig and glasses in the trial of a man accused of involvement in a transatlantic attack plot. Abid Naseer, 28, has denied involvement in an al-Qaeda conspiracy to attack Manchester and New York. The court in New York heard that Agent 1603 was spying on Abid Naseer in the weeks before his arrest in 2009. His evidence was recorded last month and played in court in Brooklyn as part of the prosecution's case. The MI5 spy said he followed Abid Naseer onto a coach and observed him watching a video of the 9/11 attacks on his mobile phone. Other British spies are expected to be called to give evidence next week.

The New York Times reports Gemalto, a French-Dutch digital security company, said on Friday that it was investigating a possible hacking by United States and British intelligence agencies that may have given them access to worldwide mobile phone communications. The investigation follows news reports on Thursday that the National Security Agency in the United States and the Government Communications Headquarters in Britain had hacked Gemalto’s networks to steal SIM card encryption codes. The claims — reported on a website called The Intercept — were based on documents from 2010 provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. The American and British intelligence agencies are said to have stolen the encryption key codes to so-called smart chips manufactured by Gemalto, which are used in cellphones, passports and bank cards around the world.

February 18, 2015

The New York Times reports Poland will abide by a European court ruling that ordered it to pay a total of $262,000 in reparations to two former inmates of a “black site” prison run by the C.I.A., the minister of foreign affairs said on Wednesday. “We have to do it,” the minister, Grzegorz Schetyna, said in an interview on the state-owned Polish Radio. “We are a law-abiding country.” The European Court of Human Rights ruled in July that Poland had violated the rights of the two terrorism suspects by handing them over to the C.I.A. in 2002 at a secret facility, which is now closed, in northeast Poland. While there, the court said, the men suffered “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.”

February 12, 2015

The New York Times reports a small team of Afghan intelligence commandos and American Special Operations forces descended on a village where they believed a leader of Al Qaeda was hiding. That night the Afghans and Americans got their man,and came away with what officials from both countries say was an even bigger prize: a laptop computer and files detailing Qaeda operations on both sides of the border. American military officials said the intelligence seized in the raid was possibly as significant as the information found in the computer and documents of Osama bin Laden after members of the Navy SEALs killed him in 2011. In the months since, the trove of intelligence has helped fuel a significant increase in night raids by American Special Operations forces and Afghan intelligence commandos, Afghan and American officials said.

The Washington Post reports the closure of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen has forced the CIA to significantly scale back its counterterrorism presence in the country, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said the evacuation represents a major setback in operations against al-Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate. The spy agency has pulled dozens of operatives, analysts and other staffers from Yemen as part of a broader extraction of roughly 200 Americans who had been based at the embassy in Sanaa, officials said. Among those removed were senior officers who worked closely with Yemen’s intelligence and security services to target al-Qaeda operatives and disrupt terrorism plots often aimed at the United States.

February 11, 2015

The Hill reports a district court in California has issued a ruling in favor of the National Security Agency in a long-running case over the spy agency’s collection of Internet records. The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision. Under the program — details of which were revealed through leaks from Edward Snowden and others — the NSA taps into the fiber cables that make up the backbone of the Internet and gathers information about people's online and phone communications. The agency then filters out communications of U.S. citizens, whose data is protected with legal defenses not extended to foreigners, and searches for “selectors” tied to a terrorist or other target.

February 10, 2015

The Miami Herald reports the 9/11 trial judge abruptly recessed the first hearing in the case since August on Monday after some of the alleged Sept. 11 plotters said they recognized a war court linguist as a former secret CIA prison worker. Alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, made the revelation just moments into the hearing by informing the judge he had a problem with his courtroom translator. The interpreter, Bin al Shibh claimed, worked for the CIA during his 2002 through 2006 detention at a so-called “Black Site.” “The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there,” he said.

Politico reports embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad says that he is the recipient of valuable intelligence on the U.S. campaign against Islamic State militants in Syria. In an interview with the BBC, Assad said he does not talk to U.S. officials, but he does receive information about American bombing campaigns through “more than one [third] party,” including Iraq. “We knew about the campaign before it started, but we didn’t know about the details,” Assad said. “There’s no dialogue. There’s, let’s say, information.” Assad denied ever knowingly supplying information to American officials. For their part, U.S. officials have denied any intention to coordinate with the Syrian government.

February 09, 2015

Politico reports the Obama Administration is pledging that it won’t destroy or return copies of the full-length Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA detention and interrogation practices without permission from the federal courts. In a court filing Friday night, the Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg not to grant an American Civil Liberties Union motion seeking to block the government from returning the unabridged versions of the so-called torture report to the Senate as new Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has requested. However, Justice Department lawyers agreed not to send the report back to the Hill while the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit is pending, unless they seek Boasberg’s okay to do so.

February 06, 2015

The Washington Post reports Britain’s electronic spy agency was acting unlawfully until December when it received intelligence provided by the U.S. National Security Agency, a British court ruled Friday. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a court that oversees the intelligence and security agencies, said that Britain’s spy agency, GCHQ, was violating human rights when it received the intercepted communications from the NSA because it did not make its safeguards public. In the tribunal’s 15-year history, this is the first time it has ruled against any of Britain’s intelligence agencies. The court also said that while the lack of transparency in the past meant that GCHQ had breached human rights, the agency has been in compliance with the law since December.

February 03, 2015

The Hill reports it’s been a year since Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Attorney General Eric Holder how it handled National Security Agency officials who abused the agency's powers, and he still hasn’t gotten an answer. Now, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee is renewing his call for Holder to explain whether or not any of the dozen people who used spying tools to track their spouses or others without authorization have been punished. In 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden released his trove of documents about the NSA, the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed that there had been twelve documented instances of “intentional misuse” of the NSA’s communications collection powers by agency employees since 2003. In one case, an employee spied on a phone number she found in her husband’s cellphone because she suspected he was cheating on her. In another, an NSA employee tracked nine different phone numbers belonging to foreign women — including at least one whom he had been sleeping with — and listened to their conversations.

The New York Times reports a year after President Obama ordered modest changes in how the nation’s intelligence agencies collect and hold data on Americans and foreigners, the administration will announce new rules requiring intelligence analysts to delete private information they may incidentally collect about Americans that has no intelligence purpose, and to delete similar information about foreigners within five years. The new rules to be announced Tuesday will also institutionalize a regular White House-led review of the National Security Agency’s monitoring of foreign leaders. Until the disclosures in the early summer of 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, there was no continuing White House assessment of whether the intelligence garnered from listening to scores of leaders around the world was worth the potential embarrassment if the programs became public.

January 28, 2015

Politico reports a federal jury’s decision Monday to convict a former CIA officer for leaking top-secret information to a New York Times reporter was a big win for prosecutors — and for Attorney General Eric Holder’s new approach to handling sensitive cases involving journalists. Holder decided to spare the reporter in the case, New York Times correspondent James Risen, from testifying against his sources. The move could become an important part of the soon-to-depart attorney general’s legacy and a guidepost for future government leak cases given that the government won the case without much testimony from the reporter who received the information.

January 26, 2015

The New York Times reports a CIA drone strike on Monday on a car in eastern Yemen, the first since the resignation of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, killed three suspected al-Qaeda fighters, American officials said, in a signal that the United States will continue its targeted killing operations in the country despite the apparent takeover by Houthi fighters. The strike took place in the central province of Marib, where a missile hit a vehicle carrying three men near the boundary with the province of Shabwa, which is believed to be a stronghold of al-Qaeda. The Central Intelligence Agency operates a drone base in southern Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen.

January 21, 2015

The Washington Post reports the new Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has demanded that the Obama administration return copies of the Senate panel’s recently completed report on the CIA’s brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects, a move apparently aimed at keeping the full version of the report from being released to the public, U.S. officials said. Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), who became chairman of the committee this month, sent a letter to President Obama last week asking “that all copies of the full and final report in the possession of the executive branch be returned immediately,” according to officials familiar with the text.

January 16, 2015

Politico reports when President Barack Obama was asked in August about the CIA's decision to examine Senate-used computers as part of an investigation of a possible security breach, the president said it was "clear" that the actions showed "very poor judgment." Obama also invoked and seemed to back CIA Director John Brennan's apology to the Senate for the incident. Now, however, the White House is giving its backing to a five-person CIA Accountability Board report that takes a far more benign view of the episode and concludes that the CIA personnel involved "acted reasonably under the complex and unprecedented circumstances involved."

January 15, 2015

Reuters reports a U.S. drone strike in northwest Pakistan killed at least five suspected militants on Thursday, Pakistani intelligence officials said. The strike, the second so far this year, targeted a compound of suspected militants in the Tehsil Ladha area of South Waziristan, a remote region bordering Afghanistan, the officials said. Pakistan often protests that U.S. drone strikes infringe its national sovereignty. But many Pakistanis suspect their government and military give at least tacit approval for the attacks, which have killed many senior Pakistani Taliban commanders. The drone strikes stopped for the first half of last year while the Pakistani government explored peace talks with the Taliban. They resumed a few days before the Pakistani military launched an anti-Taliban offensive in June.

The drone strikes stopped for the first half of last year while the Pakistani government explored peace talks with the Taliban. They resumed a few days before the Pakistani military launched an anti-Taliban offensive in June.

January 14, 2015

The Washington Post reports the Islamic State released a video on Tuesday that appeared to show a child killing two men accused of spying for Russia. In the video, the two men, who said they were from Kazakhstan and Russia, said they had been working with the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian intelligence agency, to infiltrate the extremist organization. In an interview at the start of the video, produced by al-Hayat Media Center, a man who gives his name as Mamayev Jambulat Yesenjanovich says he was working to “gather information about fighters from Russia” and to obtain computer data. The Russian man, Ashimov Sergey, says he was sent to kill an unnamed man and locate the residence of the Islamic State's leader. At the end of the video, the two men are shot with a pistol by a child at an undisclosed location. The Russian government has not confirmed that any agents were killed.

January 13, 2015

Politico reports New York Times reporter James Risen won't be called to the witness stand at a leak trial for one of his alleged sources, but jurors may hear some of the words he uttered at a pre-trial hearing last week, according to lawyers and the judge overseeing the case. Both the prosecution and the defense in the case against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling said definitively Monday that they will not call him as a witness at the trial set to begin with jury selection Tuesday morning. However, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema turned down the prosecution's bid to block all testimony from Risen. She said the defense will be permitted to tell jurors about comments Risen made at a pre-trial hearing last week where he said he had mutiple sources for information in the chapter of his 2006 book "State of War" at the heart of the case. Prosecutors contend that chapter contains highly classified information Sterling leaked about a CIA effort to undermine Iran's nuclear program.

January 12, 2015

The New York Times reports although the government’s warrantless surveillance program is associated with the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has gradually become a significant player in administering it, a newly declassified report shows. In 2008, according to the report, the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system, which collects emails of foreigners from providers like Yahoo and Google. The bureau’s top lawyer, Valerie E. Caproni, who is now a Federal District Court judge, developed procedures to make sure no such accounts belonged to Americans. Then, in October 2009, the F.B.I. started retaining copies of unprocessed communications gathered without a warrant to analyze for its own purposes. And in April 2012, the bureau began nominating new email accounts and phone numbers belonging to foreigners for collection, including through the N.S.A.’s “upstream” system, which collects communications transiting network switches.

January 09, 2015

The New York Times reports as twin hostage dramas ended violently on Friday with the deaths of armed jihadists who killed at least 13 people and traumatized France, the government faced gaping questions over the failure to thwart such brazen attacks, especially on a well-known target like the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The French intelligence services knew that striking the newspaper and its editor, for their vulgar treatment of the Prophet Muhammad, had been a stated goal of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, through its propaganda journal, Inspire. And they had the Kouachi brothers, Saïd, 34, and Chérif, 32, on their radar as previously involved in jihad-related activities, for which Chérif went to jail in 2008.

January 08, 2015

The Washington Post reports FBI Director James B. Comey said Wednesday that the recent cyberattack against Sony Pictures was traced back to Internet addresses “exclusively used” by North Korea, as he offered new evidence intended to rebut skeptics of the bureau’s claims. There is “not much in this life that I have high confidence about,” Comey said at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University in New York. “I have very high confidence about this attribution — as does the entire intelligence community.” The FBI last month attributed the attack to North Korea — a rare instance in which the U.S. government has publicly accused another government of carrying out a specific cyberattack. In a statement, the bureau cited a “technical analysis” of malicious software used in the operation. The analysis revealed links to other malware used previously by North Korean actors, the bureau said.

January 06, 2015

Reuters reports North Korean military's "cyber army" has boosted its numbers to 6,000 troops, the South Korean Defense Ministry said on Tuesday, double Seoul's estimate for the force in 2013, and is working to cause "physical and psychological paralysis" in the South. The new figure, disclosed in a ministry white paper, comes after the United States, South Korea's key ally, imposed new sanctions on North Korea for a cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. Pyongyang has denied involvement in the attack. For years, North Korea has been pouring resources into a sophisticated cyber-warfare cell called Bureau 121, run by the military's spy agency and staffed by some of the most talented computer experts in the country.

The New York Times reports the admission from Hezbollah’s deputy chief was startling. The group, he said over the weekend, is “battling espionage within its ranks” and has uncovered “some major infiltrations.” To analysts and even some Hezbollah loyalists, the remarks were immediately taken as confirmation of long-swirling reports that a senior operative had been caught spying for Israel, disrupting a series of assassination plots abroad. The accounts in the Lebanese and Arab news media, relying on unnamed sources, identify the mole as Mohammad Shawraba, the man charged with exacting revenge for Israel’s assassination of a top operative, Imad Mughniyeh, in 2008. They say Mr. Shawraba fed information to Israel that foiled five planned retaliation attempts.

January 05, 2015

The New York Times reports James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, took the witness stand in federal court on Monday and refused to answer any questions that could help the Justice Department home in on his confidential sources. In tense, sometimes confrontational testimony, Risen declared in the pretrial hearing that he would not say anything that could help prosecutors in their case against a former CIA officer who is set to go on trial soon on charges of providing classified information to Risen for his 2006 book “State of War.” Risen has been challenging a subpoena in the case for years, but this was his first appearance in court. His case is the highest-profile matter in the Justice Department’s unprecedented crackdown on government officials who talk to journalists covering national security.

December 30, 2014

The Washington Post reports in a crescendo of anger over American espionage, Germany expelled the CIA’s top operative, launched an investigation of the vast U.S. surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden and extracted an apology from President Obama for the years that U.S. spies had reportedly spent monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. In an address to Parliament last year, Merkel warned that U.S.-German cooperation would be curtailed and declared that “trust needs to be rebuilt.” But the cooperation never really stopped. The public backlash over Snowden often obscured a more complicated reality for Germany and other aggrieved U.S. allies. They may be dismayed by the omnivorous nature of the intelligence apparatus the United States has built since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but they are also deeply dependent on it.

December 29, 2014

The New York Times reports Japan and South Korea on Monday pledged for the first time to share military intelligence about North Korean weapons programs, in a three-way pact with the United States that Washington hopes will improve cooperation between its mutually estranged Asian allies. Defense analysts called the agreement a small but symbolic breakthrough because it brought together Japan and South Korea, two prosperous democracies that have been divided by emotional disputes over history and territory. The difficulties of bridging their differences were evident in the narrow scope of the pact, which was not a legally binding treaty but a memorandum of understanding.

December 17, 2014

AFP reports Romania is "ready to clear up" allegations that the country hosted secret CIA detention centres, the foreign ministry said Tuesday -- though it stressed that Bucharest had "no proof" such prisons existed. Romanian authorities were "fully available to clear up the allegations" that Bucharest colluded with the CIA on the transfer of terrorist suspects to CIA "black sites" established for the purposes of torture, the ministry said. The ministry emphasised in a statement that the central European country was not named in the summary of last week's bombshell US Senate report on the CIA's mistreatment of Al-Qaeda suspects.

Reuters reports a Cuban national freed from prison by the Cuban government provided "critical assistance" to United States agencies in exposing Cuban agents who had infiltrated the U.S. government, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence’s office said on Wednesday. The informant, whose identity U.S. officials declined to disclose, helped U.S. investigators identify and convict Ana Belen Montez, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official who was one of the highest-ranking U.S. officials ever proven to have spied for Cuba, the office said in a statement.

December 16, 2014

The Washington Post reports a majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence. In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.” The new poll comes on the heels of a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which President Obama ended in 2009.

December 15, 2014

The New York Times reports in January 2007, Judge Malcolm Howard issued an extraordinary order on behalf of the nation’s secret surveillance court. He interpreted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires individual warrants to wiretap on domestic soil, in a way that authorized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, according to documents declassified on Friday. But three months later, Judge Howard’s secret order came up for reauthorization before a colleague, Judge Roger Vinson. He balked, the documents showed. Judge Vinson permitted only a short extension of the program. While it was known that in early 2007 the FISA court had briefly approved the National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program, the newly disclosed documents shed new light on an extraordinary moment in the history of surveillance inside the United States. The revelations included the identities of the judges and aspects of the legal theory that they disagreed about.

December 09, 2014

The Washington Post reports on Monday, the Ninth Circuit held oral argument in Smith v. Obama, a Fourth Amendment challenge to the Section 215 telephony metadata program. You can watch a video of the argument here. The panel consisted of Judges Hawkins, McKeown, and Tallman. This was the third argument by a federal circuit involving a challenge to the telephony metadata program. The others are the Second Circuit and the DC Circuit, neither of which has handed down a ruling yet. To win the case before the Ninth Circuit, the plaintiff needs to win on three basic questions: 1) did the plaintiff have standing; 2) did a search occur; and 3) was the search constitutionally unreasonable. There was significant questioning on standing and a lot on what is a search, but very little on reasonableness. On the whole, I think that emphasis is probably a good sign for the government. With that said, I’m not sure which way the case will come out. Judge Tallman seemed pretty likely to vote for the government on either or both of the first two questions. I had less sense where Judges Hawkins and McKeown might come out.

The New York Times reports a scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the CIA acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public. The long-delayed report, which took five years to produce and is based on more than six million internal agency documents, is a sweeping indictment of the CIA's operation and oversight of a program carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It also provides a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the CIA used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. The CIA issued an angry response to the report, saying in a statement that it “tells part of the story,” but that “there are too many flaws for it to stand as the official record of the program.”

December 04, 2014

The New York Times reports after five years of behind-the-scenes talks, entreaties from high-profile emissaries and statements from two governments, each blaming the other for intransigence, it still comes down to this: Alan P. Gross, an American government contractor, remains imprisoned in Cuba on espionage charges. As relatives and supporters described Gross, 65, as being in declining health and growing suicidal over the lack of progress in his case, the White House on Wednesday marked the fifth year of his detention with a statement making clear that “the Cuban government’s release of Alan on humanitarian grounds would remove an impediment to more constructive relations between the United States and Cuba.” Gross was detained Dec. 3, 2009, for sneaking in communications equipment that would allow unfettered Internet access, as part of a United States Agency for International Development program aimed at fostering democracy.

December 03, 2014

The New York Times reports Iranian hackers were identified in a report released Tuesday as the source of coordinated attacks against more than 50 targets in 16 countries, many of them corporate and government entities that manage critical energy, transportation and medical services. Over the course of two years, according to Cylance, a security firm based in Irvine, Calif., Iranian hackers managed to steal confidential data from a long list of targets and, in some cases, infiltrated victims’ computer networks to such an extent that they could take over, manipulate or easily destroy data on those machines. The hackers used a set of tools that can spy on and potentially shut down critical control systems and computer networks, aiming them at targets in the United States, Canada, Israel, India, Qatar, Kuwait, Mexico, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, France, England, China and South Korea.

November 21, 2014

The Washington Post reports several foreign countries, including China, have infiltrated the computers of critical industries in the United States to steal information that could be used in the planning of a destructive attack, the director of the National Security Agency said Thursday. That was one of the cyberthreats outlined at a congressional hearing by Adm. Michael S. Rogers, who also said he expects that criminal gangs may become proxies for nations carrying out attacks on other nations. “There are multiple nation-states that have the capability and have been on the [industrial] systems,” he said before the House Intelligence Committee.

November 19, 2014

The Hill reports senators’ decision to block a major intelligence reform bill only pushed the issue off the table by a matter of months and guaranteed a tough fight early in 2015. Lawmakers on Tuesday came two votes short of the 60 needed to advance the USA Freedom Act, Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) bill to reform the National Security Agency. Senators’ decision to block a major intelligence reform bill only pushed the issue off the table by a matter of months and guaranteed a tough fight early in 2015. Lawmakers on Tuesday came two votes short of the 60 needed to advance the USA Freedom Act, Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) bill to reform the National Security Agency.